30.06.2025

Rare recording from the operetta 'Mademoiselle Nitouche' by Florimond Hervé

Today we celebrate the 200th birth anniversary of Florimond Hervé, the prominent French composer and organist, one of the founders of French operetta.

Florimond Hervé was born on June 30, 1825 in the town of Houdain near Arras. As a child, he sang in church choir. He received his musical education at the Paris Conservatory under Daniel Auber. He worked as an organist and choirmaster at a church attached to the psychiatric hospital in Bicêtre, near Paris. He practised music therapy during classes and rehearsals with patients at the clinic. At the same time, he worked in musical theatre: first as an actor and singer, then as a composer, playwright and director.

In 1845, Florimond Hervé won a competition for the position of organist at the Church of Saint-Eustache in Paris. When his compositions began to enjoy success, he devoted his life entirely to musical theatre. In 1848, under the pseudonym ‘Hervé,’ the composer wrote a one-act musical burlesque, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which was a great success with the public. This performance is sometimes even considered the first French operetta.

In 1851, Hervé was appointed conductor and director of the orchestra at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. In 1855, after becoming director of the Folie-Mayer café-chantant on Boulevard du Temple in Paris, Hervé reorganised it into his own theatre called the Folies-Concertantes, for which he began writing and stage new operettas. A month later, the theatre was renamed the Folies-Nouvelle. This theatre had a great influence on the formation of the operetta genre and its further development.

Florimond Hervé was the creator of the ‘opérette-bouffe’ genre. His early works, mainly buffooneries, were very similar in genre to operetta, which is why he is considered, along with Offenbach, to be the founder of French operetta and, to some extent, its predecessor. In total, Hervé wrote more than 120 operettas.
In 1883, he created his most famous operetta, ‘Mademoiselle Nitouche’.

The ‘Emusing Automata’ section of the museum exposition features a musical automaton ‘Little Girl with Toys,’ created in the workshop of Leopold Lambert in Paris circa 1900.

it is of interest to note that when the mechanism is turned on, it plays a melody from the operetta by Florimond Hervé ‘Mlle Nitouche,’ encoded on a metal pinned cylinder. It accompanies all the actions and movements of the doll.

In the last years of his life, Hervé suffered from mental illness and died in Paris on November 4, 1892.

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